Economic Populism: Opiate of the Democrats

The deceptive comforts of magical thinking.

I never cease to be amazed at the touching faith of many Democrats in the wonder-working powers of economic populism. In the wake of Democrats’ stunning defeat by the hated Trump and his allegedly fascist party, this brand of magical thinking has risen again within the Democratic ranks. Sure, the argument goes, the party has lots of problems but there is nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by turning up the volume—way up—on an economic populist pitch. That will finally convince the lamentably unfaithful working class that their real interests lie with their old pals the Democrats.

It certainly makes sense that in our current populist era, Democrats need to be responsive to that populist mood. But it makes much less sense that an aggressive economic populism by itself is a sort of get-out-of-jail free card for a party whose brand among working-class voters has been profoundly damaged. In fact, it’s completely ridiculous, a comforting myth for Democrats who don’t want to make hard choices. Here are four reasons why Democrats should discard this magical thinking as quickly as possible and devote their energies to strategies that might actually work.

1. Economic populism cannot solve the cultural leftism problem. In a post-election YouGov survey of working-class (non-college) voters for the Progressive Policy Institute, 68 percent of these voters said Democrats have moved too far left, compared to just 47 percent who thought Republicans have moved too far right. It’s a fair surmise that working-class sentiment about the Democrats’ leftism is heavily driven by the party’s embrace of cultural leftist positions across a wide range of issues (immigration, crime, race, gender, etc.) given how unpopular these positions are among those voters.

And in a widely-noted finding from a post-election survey by the Blueprint strategy group, the third most potent reason—after too much inflation and too much illegal immigration—for voters to choose Trump over Harris in a pairwise comparison test was, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class”. And among swing voters, this concern about cultural focus was the most powerful reason.

In the same poll, overwhelming majorities (67 to 77 percent) of swing voters who chose Trump thought the following characterizations of Democrats were extremely or very accurate: not tough enough on the border crisis; support immigrants more than American citizens; want to take money from hard-working Americans and give it to immigrants; want to promote transgender ideology; don’t care about securing the border; have extreme ideas about immigration; aren’t doing enough to address crime; and are too focused on identity politics.

It’s magical thinking that simply changing the subject to economics will evaporate the Democrats’ many cultural liabilities. Culture matters—a lot—and the issues to which they are connected matter. They are a hugely important part of how voters assess who is on their side and who is not; whose philosophy they can identify with and whose they can’t.

Instead, for many working-class voters to seriously consider their economic pitch, Democrats need to convince them that they are not looked down on, that their concerns are taken seriously and that their views on culturally freighted issues will not be summarily dismissed as unenlightened. That’s the threshold test for many of the working-class voters Democrats need to reach and Democrats have flunked it over and over.

That’s why changing the subject to economic populism doesn’t work and won’t work—any more than talking incessantly about MAGA extremism/fascism did in the last election. Working-class voters aren’t stupid and they can tell when you’re just changing the subject and have not really changed the underlying cultural outlook they detest. Convincing voters of the latter is much harder and more uncomfortable for Democrats. But it has to be done.

2. Economic populism will not produce a big turnout dividend. Many Democrats have looked at the 2024 election results, noticed that Harris, relative to Biden, lost more votes than Trump gained across the two elections and concluded the Democrats’ loss was really about poor turnout. Comforting solution: more economic populism please! That will, it is alleged, galvanize the higher turnout among Democratic-leaning voters needed in future elections.

But was turnout really the problem? As Nate Cohn points out, even under generous assumptions, lower relative Democratic turnout likely explains no more than a third of lower Democratic support. And critically, nonvoting attrition among 2020 Biden voters is inextricable from vote-switching to Trump. Both reflected dissatisfaction with Harris, the Democrats, and the record of Biden administration.

[L]ow turnout among traditionally Democratic-leaning groups—especially nonwhite voters—was a reflection of lower support for Ms. Harris: Millions of Democrats soured on their party and stayed home, reluctantly came back to Ms. Harris or even made the leap to Mr. Trump. And if those who stayed home had voted, it wouldn’t have been an enormous help to Ms. Harris, based on Times/Siena polling linked to validated records of who did or didn’t vote.

Clearly, the turnout problem, such as it was, was an indicator of broad dissatisfaction with Harris and her party. As noted above, that broad dissatisfaction cannot and will not be solved by sprinkling the magic elixir of economic populism onto the currently existing Democratic Party and its tarnished brand. There will be no turnout dividend separate from fixing that brand.

3. Economic populism will do nothing to fix Democrats’ governance problems. Pretty much by definition, economic populism in whatever form has little to do with making Democratic governance of states and, especially, cities any better. Democratic governance is not, to say the least, synonymous with public order, low crime, and effective and efficient administration of public services. Quite the contrary. Progressive domination of deep blue cities instead has become synonymous with poor governance across the board. Josh Barro:

I write this to you from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them…Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally-disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system…even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense) they don’t do much about it…The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at Duane Reade is in locked cabinets…[S]chools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated. Currently, we are under state court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes it very hard to build anything—and it’s really expensive to travel here, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council literally made it illegal to build new hotels. And as a result of all of this, we are shedding population—we’re probably going to lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where it is possible to build housing and grow the economy.

Ouch. No wonder Democratic-governed large metros, including and especially New York City, swung so heavily to the right in the last election. Fixing this has nothing at all to do with economic populism and everything to do with getting better at governing. That will not be easy with the array of Democratic-oriented interest groups who benefit from the current system (I’m looking at you non-profit industrial complex!) and of course the innumerable regulations that undermine efficient public services and prevent the building of needed housing and infrastructure.

Speaking of regulations, economic populism has nothing to say about the radical reform we need in the country’s regulatory and permitting structure so that, well, stuff could actually get done. As Ezra Klein points out:

The first contract to build the New York subways was awarded in 1900. Four years later—four years—the first 28 stations opened.

Compare that to now. In 2009, Democrats passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, pumping billions into high-speed rail. Fifteen years later, you cannot board a high-speed train funded by that bill anywhere in the country.

Appalling. There are innumerable other examples. How about the $42 billion allocated in the 2021 infrastructure act to provide broadband access to underserved, primarily, rural areas? Three years later, almost nothing’s been done. Or how about the $7.5 billion allocated by the IRA to build half a million EV charging stations? So far, a grand total of seven! This should be completely unacceptable.

As should the failure of the bipartisan Energy Permitting Reform Bill of 2024. The bill would have facilitated the building of renewable energy infrastructure, particularly long-distance transmission lines, as well as new fossil fuel infrastructure. But the environmental groups blocked it so we’re still stuck with the same old glacially slow and inefficient permitting regime for energy infrastructure, ensuring that the goals of the IRA, of questionable feasibility to begin with, will certainly not be met. In the immortal words of Bob Dole: “Where’s the outrage?”

This is a problem that most assuredly will not be fixed by a generous dose of economic populism. Not even close.

4. Economic populism is inadequate as populism. We are certainly in a populist era and it makes sense to respond to that mood. But it does not necessarily follow that Democrats can effectively speak to that mood simply by bashing the rich (“the billionaire class”), insisting they pay their fair share, and advocating for programs aimed at middle- and working-class voters, rather than corporate priorities. Many voters, including swing voters, are certainly sympathetic to such a pitch. But what this approach leaves out is that the populist sentiments of voters go much deeper than that.

To put it bluntly, voters, particularly working-class voters, harbor deep resentment toward elites who they feel are telling them how to live their lives, even what to think and say, and incidentally are living a great deal more comfortably than they are. This is not the rich as conventionally defined by economic populism but rather the professional-dominated educated upper middle class who occupy positions of administrative and cultural power. By and large, these are Democrats in Democratic-dominated institutions. Looked at in this context, truly populist Democrats might want to say, with Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

This is a bitter pill for most Democrats to swallow. In today’s America, they are the Establishment even if in their imaginations they are sticking it to the Man and fighting nobly for social justice. The failure to understand that they themselves are central targets of populist anger leads Democratic elites and activists to overestimate the efficacy of economic populism and interpret populism on the right as driven solely by racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. That’s more comfortable than realizing millions of populist voters hate you. But they do.

Coming to terms with this reality—while unpleasant—will help Democrats overcome their current tendency toward magical thinking. Assuming they want to. Magical thinking may not lead to effective politics but it can be mighty comforting.